For Love of Trees by Sara Wright

Yesterday I dreamed that I discovered a bird’s nest that was hidden in the center of an evergreen tree. This little dream moved me deeply because this is the time of year I celebrate my love and gratitude for all trees, but especially evergreens, and the dream felt like an important message. For me in winter, the “Tree of Life” is an evergreen.

Outdoors, I recently placed a glass star in the center of my newly adopted Juniper here in New Mexico, repeating a pattern that began in Maine years ago with my Guardian Juniper in whose center I also placed a star…Inside the house an open circle created out of a completely decayed tree trunk sits at the center of my Norfolk pine; around the room spruce, juniper and pinion boughs are twinkling with miniature lights. The tree has a festival of lights at her feet. The point of making these gestures is to keep me mindful that tree bodies are sacred in their wholeness and each tree explicates the immanence of divinity. Another way of saying this is to say that Natural Power lives in trees. This goddess is steadfast.

I do not believe in god.

But the reality of “Natural Power” is an ongoing force in my life. When I am deeply troubled I turn to trees or birds or animals for help, and they always respond, although often it takes me a long time to understand their messages, mostly because my intellect and cultural conditioning gets in the way of intuition, sensing, and feeling.

Sometimes dreams help me to bridge the gap, and when I dreamed that the tree held a nest I felt a great comfort moving through me…

It seemed to me that the dream was showing me that the “little bird woman self” (most vulnerable personality) has a safe place to rest within the protected boughs of the evergreen, also her Tree of Life.

Because I am living in two worlds and must find a way to move between the two, I am by necessity a “snow bird” migrating from north to south with the seasons, so it means a great deal to me that I have a place to feel contained and nurtured among fragrant boughs anywhere I go.

Sara is a naturalist, ethologist ( a person who studies animals in their natural habitats) (former) Jungian Pattern Analyst, and a writer. She publishes her work regularly in a number of different venues and is presently living in Northern New Mexico.

I love little birds, too, especially the little chirpy ones. (A friend once told me they were wrens and chickadees and others whose names I don’t remember.) I believe they come in person or in dreams to, maybe, wake us up to something. When I was a child, I climbed trees. Now I gaze at them and hope no one cuts them down.

Your star reminds me of the musical Carousel and the star that Billy Bigelow tries to give to his daughter, then to his widow as he sings the final reprise of “If I Love You” as “How I Loved You.” The star is a sign of his undying love.

Barbara, the little chirpy ones are wrens and chickadees and little finches and nuthatches and I have lots of them around here because I feed my birds… There is only that one juniper close to the house and sometimes it is full of when seems like a hundred birds at once!

I love this post, Sara! I have a little evergreen outdoors that I decorate in the winter. It is at my little sacred spot, where I have a plastic chair and where I feed the birds and squirrels. I love to sit there and watch them!